Making the invitation process easier on an invitation only Ning.
If your computers are on a school network, paste the invitation link into a simple html page and save in a shared file. This is particularly useful if your students are using "fake" email accounts.
Creating "fake" email accounts
Ning Social Networks do not require email confirmation for registration, therefore students can easily sign up using a "fake" or "dummy" email address based on 1 mail account.
There are 2 ways to go about setting up dummy mail addresses:
If your school has its own domain you can check about a "catchall" mailbox, either on your mailserver or by way of google apps for education - "CatchAll" catches mail sent to your domain but to mail addresses that don't exist. eg lets say that heather@yourschool.edu doesn't exist, any mail sent to that address would go straight into the catchall mailbox. So your students could safely sign up using any @yourschool mail address.
The other way to do it would be to set up a gmail account under your name or any other name you choose eg: heather@gmail.com. Then when signing up students for ning you would give their email addresses as:heather+STUDENTNAME1@gmail.com, heather+STUDENTNAME2@gmail.com etc.
These solutions would only be useful for signing up to sites that don't require email confirmation.
As the seperate mailboxes don't exist rather one mail account is catching all the mail, your students don't have access to the incoming mail, it cannot therefore be used as a mail service.
However students can access private messages from within the ning network, and teacher will recieve a copy of these messages in the dummy account.
School as Member in a Joint Schools Ning
Member search on Ning leaves a lot to be desired. This can be problematic when trying to find friends from different schools while working in a Ning that is shared by more than one school.
A simple way to get around it is to have the different schools add their school as a member and then have only their students befriend the school.
In effect this creates School pages with profiles of all the students from the schools. Students can now find friends from different schools simply by visiting the School Page.
Ning Tips 'n Tricks
Making the invitation process easier on an invitation only Ning.
If your computers are on a school network, paste the invitation link into a simple html page and save in a shared file. This is particularly useful if your students are using "fake" email accounts.
Creating "fake" email accounts
Ning Social Networks do not require email confirmation for registration, therefore students can easily sign up using a "fake" or "dummy" email address based on 1 mail account.
There are 2 ways to go about setting up dummy mail addresses:
If your school has its own domain you can check about a "catchall" mailbox, either on your mailserver or by way of google apps for education - "CatchAll" catches mail sent to your domain but to mail addresses that don't exist. eg lets say that heather@yourschool.edu doesn't exist, any mail sent to that address would go straight into the catchall mailbox. So your students could safely sign up using any @yourschool mail address.
The other way to do it would be to set up a gmail account under your name or any other name you choose eg: heather@gmail.com. Then when signing up students for ning you would give their email addresses as:heather+STUDENTNAME1@gmail.com, heather+STUDENTNAME2@gmail.com etc.
These solutions would only be useful for signing up to sites that don't require email confirmation.
As the seperate mailboxes don't exist rather one mail account is catching all the mail, your students don't have access to the incoming mail, it cannot therefore be used as a mail service.
However students can access private messages from within the ning network, and teacher will recieve a copy of these messages in the dummy account.
School as Member in a Joint Schools Ning
Member search on Ning leaves a lot to be desired. This can be problematic when trying to find friends from different schools while working in a Ning that is shared by more than one school.
A simple way to get around it is to have the different schools add their school as a member and then have only their students befriend the school.
In effect this creates School pages with profiles of all the students from the schools. Students can now find friends from different schools simply by visiting the School Page.